"After using PC-BSD several days, I was impressed with how easy it is to use. It's a good desktop OS, and a great way to introduce BSD to new users. The 1.0 release has a few rough edges, but nothing that should scare off prospective users. For the future, I'd like to see something like Synaptic to manage PBI packages and allow users to browse for software without having to visit the PC-BSD Web site, and it would be nice if the site had a little more documentation, but I expect such things will come along in due time as the project matures."

I am a Linux person as well, and have used FreeBSD as my everyday desktop for 2 months in the past. It was great from a Slackware/Gentoo perspective, but ports were weak for upgrading the system. Too much recompiling (even more than Gentoo).

To be honest I haven't tried PCBSD yet, I plan to one of these days. What I have tried is DesktopBSD, and it looks good to me, I think it deserves more public attention. What it gives you is a "proper" FreeBSD, with a quick & easy installation. Nice way to get started with FreeBSD (be sure to read the handbook - it's a must). Binary upgrades are preferred to compiling from source (don't know how well this works, haven't used it enough).

Now I am rather sceptical about PCBSD. .pbi probably can't scale much... but if it can and I am wrong, then it's a step in the right direction for desktop Un*x.

The fact that (I think) PCBSD doesn't, for example, install bash by default (DesktopBSD does) which is something most Linux users would do, and .pbi ignoring ports, prompt me that PCBSD are attempting to build a desktop OS despite being based on FreeBSD, rather than a preconfigured FreeBSD desktop (DesktopBSD's approach).

But still, it brings FreeBSD desktop some publicity.

Now: my dream FreeBSD desktop would use apt-get-ish binary package management (handling versions and such) and still keep ports v2 around, somehow. I don't think anyone is working on this though.

I am a Linux person as well, and have used FreeBSD as my everyday desktop for 2 months in the past. It was great from a Slackware/Gentoo perspective, but ports were weak for upgrading the system. Too much recompiling (even more than Gentoo).

I wander why you say that - I spent two months with gentoo and came back screaming to ports, which gives me the same lean system with 1/10 of the configuration headache. And you can't have "more" recompiling - when you upgrade, you upgrade the packages you have installed. If you have more packages installed, there'll be more recompiling during an upgrade.

Well, pkg_add -r pkgname is roughtly equivalent to apt-get install pkgname. In fact, the FreeBSD ports system (and this feature alone makes it better than any pkg management I tried) makes it ridiculously easy to create binary packages, even from software you installed from ports! a pkg_create -R -b ooo-build* will build an ooo-build binary with all its dependencies in your current directory. This binary will be similar to a .deb - it knows exactly what packages are needed to be installed as dependencies, the pkg_* tools are able to fetch them automatically, etc. This makes deployment of customized, precompiled, optimized (for instance, for i686) binary packages very easy. You can build on one machine, and put the binaries on an ftp, and install them via pkg_add on the rest. Oh, and creating binary packages during installation is as easy as adding a single letter to portupgrade/portinstall: portupgrade -ap. -p will put a binary package in /usr/ports/packages (in fact, it will automatically create the same directory layout you would find on the official ftp repositories for binary packages) if it exists, or in the port directory if it doesn't.

.pbi probably can't scale much
What do you mean? What is "scaling" in the context of package management?

I spent two months with gentoo and came back screaming to ports, which gives me the same lean system with 1/10 of the configuration headache. And you can't have "more" recompiling - when you upgrade, you upgrade the packages you have installed.

FreeBSD ports miss information about versions (package abc requires def >=2.5). So, either you recompile all dependencies, even if you didn't intend to, and be on the safe side or try your luck and skip it. Also, I think there isn't a "stable" branch for ports, only "current" exists - that would be equivalent to running ~arch in Gentoo.

As for .pbi, it's intention is probably to install a few desktop apps e.g. firefox, but the rest of the system e.g. Gnome is still using tradional packages? (or I am wrong). That doesn't look good to me.

Re: CaptainFlint. portupgrade helps, but can't solve the above problems. As I said I haven't used binaries much though.

You should read look up portinstall and portupgrade. They make upgrading and installing software from the ports easy. Also supported with portupgrade are binary upgrades to software. It is very comprehensive when it comes to software maintenance. Although it has been almost 6 months since I've used FreeBSD as my main desktop os.